We know very little about the life of Burke for the ten years, 1750–60, his first ten years in England,--except that he did _not_ diligently apply himself to his nominal business, the study of the law; and between the years 1752 and 1757 his biographers can show hardly one authentic trace of his real life. They know neither his whereabouts nor his employments. Only one scrap of his correspondence remains from those years to give us any hint of the time. Even Richard Shackleton, his invariable confidant and bosom friend, hears never a word from him during that period, and is told afterwards only that his correspondent has been “sometimes in London, sometimes in remote parts of the country, sometimes in France,” and will “shortly, please God, be in America.” He disappears a poor law student, under suspicion of his father for systematic neglect of duty; when he reappears he is married to the daughter of a worthy physician and is author of two philosophical works which are attracting a great deal of attention. We have reason to believe that, in the mean time, he did as much writing as they would take for the booksellers; we know that he frequented the London theatres and several of the innumerable debating clubs with which nether London abounded, whetting his faculties, it is said, upon those of a certain redoubtable baker. He haunted the galleries and lobbies of the House of Commons. His health showed signs of breaking, and Dr. Nugent took him from his lodgings in the Temple to his own house and allowed him to fall in love with his daughter. Partly for the sake of his health, perhaps, but more particularly, no doubt, for the sake of satisfying an eager mind and a restless habit, he wandered off to “remote parts of the country” and to France, with one William Burke for company, a man either related to him or not related to him, he did not himself know which. In 1755, a long-suffering patience at length exhausted, his father shut the home treasury against him; and then,--’twas the next year,--he published two philosophical works and married Miss Nugent.